As you can probably guess from the fact that takes four volumes to go through, and also that I’m not working at breakneck speed, this is a long term project. And as far as I know, it is not like any other project at all; last night a friend asked me who else is doing something similar, and all I could do was stare at the ceiling looking thoughtful. This might not even seem to be a worthwhile endeavor; Lévi-Strauss is not exactly what we would call trendy these days in anthropology, and Mythologiques is at best “largely unread,” as a friend of my mentioned in a twitter post about the site. So why do it?

It’s not that I’m trying to bring Lévi-Strauss back from the grave, that much is certain. My biggest influence outside of anthropology is Gilles Deleuze, who was infamous for his disdain for structuralism in his mature years.And it’s not because there is some resonance between our field sites (to the degree that you can even say that Lévi-Strauss had a ‘field site’). Whether it is transhumanist Mormons or Southern Californian Charismatic Evangelicals, it would be hard to shoehorn any of my projects into his. One could say, I guess, that the reason for this exercise is that it is so foreign to my work. Anthropology is not about alterity, but it is about human capacity to differ, meaning both self-differ as individuals or groups change over time, but also to differ from themselves. And there is a considerable degree of difference when thinking about the contemporary American religious moment in comparison to Lévi-Strauss. But, to be honest, “I don’t know” is the real reason. I’m not saying that I do not know the real reason, but rather that I have no idea what will happen with this project, what I will write, what it will do to me, what I might become. This is an experiment – possibly a quite protracted one – and there is no knowing its effects.